BOND gives LAB Institute of Design and Fine Arts a living identity

The Brand Identity: ‘Muotoillaanpa se toisin’ is a phrase that works double duty in Finnish. It means both ‘Let’s design it differently’ and ‘Let’s reformulate that.’ For BOND, the global brand design studio tasked with renewing the identity of LAB Muotoiluinstituutti (or LAB Institute of Design and Fine Arts) in Lahti, that linguistic duality became the conceptual spine of everything that followed. LAB Muotoiluinstituutti is one of Finland’s most prestigious creative higher-education institutions, operating within LAB University of Applied Sciences. When it set out to rethink its brand, the ambition was to go beyond a surface-level refresh.

The institute needed to strengthen its position in an increasingly competitive landscape, clarify its role within the broader LAB organisation, and reignite its appeal among prospective designers, artists and creative professionals both domestically and internationally. “We set out to create an identity that would inspire students while embodying the institute’s core philosophy: to reform, rethink and reshape,” explains Jesper Bange, Co-Founder & Chief Design Officer at BOND. The strategic shift that underpins the project is deceptively simple. Higher education branding tends to describe programmes, facilities and heritage.

BOND chose instead to define transformation. Rather than presenting the institute as a place to study design, the positioning frames it as a launchpad for a new kind of creative professional – people who actively reshape their field, their surroundings and themselves. The question posed to prospective students: Do you want to become just another professional, or someone who reformulates the field? That provocation needed a logo that could embody it. A static mark felt wrong for an institution built on continuous reinvention.

“We explored more flexible directions and experimented with a wide range of forms before arriving at the final mark,” Bange shares. “It took many iterations to strike the right balance between legibility and playfulness – making sure the form could still hold together as a recognisable shape while allowing for a sense of looseness and transformation.” The client encouraged something slightly odd and expressive, which gave the team room to push into a more sculptural direction. The resulting logo behaves like clay. A shape that feels alive and somewhat unpredictable, but still intentional. It has a master form, yet its DNA is never fixed.

In motion, it continuously reforms from within, refusing to settle into a single expression. Its negative space becomes a creative device in its own right – functioning as rupture, portal and container for content and people. To bring this malleability beyond the logo itself, BOND developed a custom digital tool that lets students reshape letterforms freely, producing their own characters and forms as part of the system. “This positions students as central to the identity, and to the institute itself,” Bange notes.

The tool was part of the internal launch, designed to help students feel ownership of the brand rather than observe it from a distance. The challenge was keeping it simple and intuitive while clearly expressing the idea of continuous reshaping – what Bange describes as the “never finished” identity. The goal was participation, not perfection. The typographic system brings together typefaces by Schick Toikka, a foundry co-founded by LAB graduate Lauri Toikka, which introduced a meaningful internal connection to the school itself.

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The article discusses a significant rebranding effort for an educational institution, which has implications for the design industry, while introducing innovative concepts of flexibility and participation in brand identity that are relevant to brand strategy professionals.